Going blonde to 'hide' grey?

[SM4713]

Today, I met with a 3rd friend (all in 40's) who have either had more highlights or changed from brunette to blonde, stating its to 'hide' the grey. Am I the only one that can clearly see the grey and going 'blonde' makes no difference at all? 😕

@NeverDropYourMooncup

If you imagine the corpse of a fieldmouse underneath a layer of snow, slush and council depot grit, you've got roughly the right palette.

😂

you paint a picture!

In my 20s I worked in a building with a large number of women in their 50s and they did all appear to dye their hair "ash blonde" at a certain percentage grey - it is a colour that is very aging to that specific point in life as older women have often stopped dying white or grey and younger ones choose different blonde shades, not blonde+grey.
I generally thought the one lady with cropped dark salt-and-pepper hair and a lilac stripe through the front looked the best!

I agree OP.

For some the grey blends into the blonde hair but to be honest, for many the grey hair is just as obviously grey whether in blonde or brown hair. I was talking to a friend about this recently. Her natural hair colour is brown. She was getting blonde high (or maybe low) lights in to make it fairer.
Her hair is now 90% grey abd she has it coloured blonde. Her hair grows fast and the ‘blonde’ is very obviously grey. She can’t afford to have her colour done every three weeks and thinks the grey is less noticeable than it is. She saw photos recently and was shocked to see how grey it looked.
She doesn’t want to ‘embrace’ the grey as she tried this before and her family (siblings) complained that she was ‘letting herself go’.

Not sure what the solution is. She tried cheaper hairdressers but the blonde colour looked yellow and worse than ever.

My blonde highlights definitely hide my grey.
I can go up to 9 weeks before I need to go back for a re-touch as it blends so well and when my roots start showing they look generically 'dark' rather than grey.
When my hair was mid-brown my roots looked terrible. And very grey.
Highlights are popular for a reason - they are definitely kinder to the ageing lady.

The town next to mine is very middle/upper class and all the older women have blonde hair. I just look at them and think ah, they're covering up their grey. It's so obvious. You can also see the greys still?

It's not about covering it up,it's about blending it in so the transition to grey isn't so obvious.

I have grey hair with some blonde highlights. I'm not trying to hide anything or transition to grey, I just got a bit bored with my hair colour and fancied a change, like anyone else might. I've been going grey since I was 18 and am 50 this year, so I really don't give a fig whether it's aging or not... it's just the slowly changing colour I've had throughout all my adult life.

But it's obvious when everyone is suddenly blonde, when they weren't previously

I went down the highlights route to blend the grey some years' ago but have given up - unless you have unlimited funds it can get expensive.

My natural hair is dark brown, so when a hairdresser visit was much in need, the highlights would have grown out at the roots, grey roots where my hair is grey would be an inch long, dark roots would be an inch long and the overall look was less than great!

@NeverDropYourMooncup were you naturally red ? I was deep auburn as a child lightening as I got older and now strawberry blonde but now people don't see me and think ginger any more and I'm livid. I've had ( I fear too many ) blonde highlights so next time will be asking for more copper to put some red back in. Have heard good things about nice and easy copper blonder though. It's so depressing

I didn't mean obvious to anyone else and to be fair any colour due is obvious, I meant for me the difference between my dark hair and patches of grey isn't so obvious .

I've gone from my mousey brown to blonde as the greys were coming thick and fast. I've also had it chopped and I look bloody great if I do say so myself. Wish I'd done it years ago.

If anyone looks at me and thinks I've done it to hide the greys, they're right but what of it?!

If I left the greys people would think something of that - none of us can win really, can we.

I completely disagree with you! I used to have jet black hair, started going grey, and my roots came in silver after only 5 days- you could see a literal silver line down my parting next to the black and it looked very obvious. It also appears as if your hair is thinning because the white hair looks like scalp compared to the dark hair.

I've since gone honey blonde and my roots don't show for several weeks now. You'd have to examine my head very, very carefully to see them. So I agree with your friends.

I shaved my hair off in lockdown to start again and now I am totally dye free and going grey, I am embracing it, its cut in a short crop now and I am used to it now, I am going to grow the front a bit longer but in the light when its styled nicely, I really like the colour

I started going grey when I was about 25. Kept dyeing my hair dark brown till I was late 40s but the grey halo ( I'm now about 80% grey) was a pain to keep dyeing over so I started to go blonder over a couple of years. I let a lot grow out over lockdown but the shade of grey I am looked awful on me so I went back to blonde.

Apart from anything else the lighter hair looks so much better with my skin tone - flat dark brown hair looks much more ageing as you get older and the spark goes out of your skin. When I look back at pictures of myself in my 40s I'm amazed I carried on for so long

I have babylights and a root smudge every 8 weeks or so and yes you can see my grey roots after a while but a quick swoosh with a root spray in mid brown and it's gone.

I don't understand the judgeyness on here sometimes. The faux ' But whyyyyy...?' posts about other women's choices really piss me off

I am naturally mid brown and when the grey got a bit beyond the flat dark box set look, I found hairdressers a bit too keen to go down the blonde highlights route. After a couple of goes it is overblonde. I went through two hairdressers and switched to a third who listened to me and she got it straight away. I'm not blonde and don't want to be blonde. She mixed blonde (not bleach) highlights with a light ash brown lowlights so the overall effect is light and blended. I went 10 weeks until the next appointment when I could really see the regrowth. I think there's a midpoint. I hated the overblonding but love it now.

I recently went to a new hairdresser and we talked about this. I’m naturally very dark brown, but with plenty of grey. We talked about skin tone and she agreed with me that blonde will never work.
So, I get it dyed every 3 weeks a cool brown, at some point I’ll go grey. But not quite yet. I’m thinking of the Dawn French approach 😂

With all these things I reserve the right to change my mind maybe I’ll go for bright blue instead!

Every 3 weeks! Omg I just could not be arsed with that! That’s one ongoing battle !

You lot seem to know your colours. If you’re a warm toned person, how do you handle greys and whites which are very cool? Is that why the blonde comes in? A way to introduce warmer tones?

yes it's obvious its just hair dye people know that. im not trying to fool anybody with my obvious lighter hair at nearly 52 years old .

I couldn't do that either ,for a start I couldn't afford every 3 weeks. when I was dark I could have re touched every 3 weeks now as I've gone lighter it's 12 sometimes more my new hairdresser is fab she will advise me what she thinks needs done,but I definitely wouldn't be doing every 3 weeks.

As soon as I started to notice grey hairs, mainly around my temple, I started to colour my hair. But the greys came back after only about a week. So I asked my hairdresser to blonde me. At first it was highlights because there was still colour in my hair that I needed to grow out. Then she started to do an all over blonde colour, but lockdown happened and I died it brown again because of the roots. Finally last year all the colour had grown out and I went for bleached blonde. I love it. The greys don’t come back because the grey pigment is bleached out. And my roots come through still mainly brown. There is nothing worse than a brunette with grey roots, it looks awful and it was definitely something I wanted to avoid.

Wow, so much judgement about women ageing on this thread!

Women going grey can decide to live with it, go blonde, dye dark and spend a lot of time and money having frequent top ups, or home dye dark and get blocky colour that often has a gingery tone.

None of those will disguise the fact you are going grey. None of them will make you younger than you are. Pure white or silver can look stunning, but the in between stage can look quite mousy on some women. So some women choose to go blonde.
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You are literally, in your OP emoji, sneering at your friend's choices.

You're in your 40s - the next 20 years will see some friends choosing to cut their hair short because it is literally the only thing that works for some women's thinning hair. Some will start wearing cardigans because it's the only thing that works for some menopausal women. Some will have to give up eye make or contact lenses because their eyes will no longer tolerate them. Some will find that thinning lips or hooded eyes have a massive impact on how they look. Some will be in flowing bright coloured garments because they have put on weight or in frumpy comfortable shoes because their feet won't fit in anything stylish any more.

And some people will sneer at their middle aged mumsy choices but actually absolutely none of that matters. Because by the time you get to your 60s, you'll also have lost friends far too young to cancer, you will know people so depressed they have given up caring what they look like, and you will realise that just enjoying looking the best you can on a daily basis is a statement of resilience and optimism that should be applauded and not sneered at.

just enjoying looking the best you can on a daily basis is a statement of resilience and optimism that should be applauded and not sneered at

100%

3-5 weeks is more accurate 😂 I have so many friends that have gone lighter and just end up with roots that are definitely more noticeable than they realise plus lightening causes the hair to be brittle.

However @BishyBarnyBee you are completely right. What works for me now, may not in a couple of years. One thing I’ve learnt about aging is things do change and my opinions as to what works will to. I may well be blonde in 3 years time. Or be doing any number of things I never thought I would.